In this episode, we explore that feeling of stuckness that can hit when we lose connection with the story…
What am I trying to say here? Well, actually, that’s, uh, kind of the point, isn’t it? Something like that, anyway?
Feeling a bit lost for words right now…
It’s been one of those weeks: coming to the end of one major project, needing to get straight into the next, and then suddenly nothing seems to work. Or rather, there’s nothing actually wrong as such, no wallowing in misery, no great disaster; it’s more that I kinda can’t find the groove, can’t find the story. It’s not the classic ‘writer’s block’ - oh, yeah, I know that one all too well! - but more like the door is there, and I can see through it out into the wider world beyond, but I can’t make sense of how to work out how to open the door.
Like me, the weather out there can’t quite work out what it wants to do. It’s doing the good ol’ Australian-thing again: blisteringly hot for a few days - bushfires already, even this early in the season, just down towards the coast from here - then back to numbing cold, and now rain rain rain, and taging floods now in the the places where there were raging fires just a day or two before. And yeah, as you’ll see from the photo above, it’s been raining hard out here too, knocking down the last of last year’s leaves, to make more room for more of the spring.
Which I need to do, too, of course: wash away the old, clear the mind for new ideas, new change, new growth.
Right now, for me, it’s just a straightforward case of too many ideas and not enough information to bring them to completion. That’s what I’ve been stuck about. Typical spring weather again, I guess. In a metaphoric sense, at least.
Yet for so many of my colleagues, and for me, all too often, it’s just the sheer enormity of what we’re facing that can so easily bring all the action to a grinding halt. The sheer scale of the changes needed to tackle climate-change, for example; the mind-bending complexity not just of each of the elements of that story, but about how they all interact with each other, too. And yeah, that one ain’t no metaphor no more: more like scarily real. No surprise that it will so easily leave us lost for words from time to time…
But that’s the point, isn’t it? Whenever we get flattened by overload and burnout and inability to focus and all those other usual messes - like I have had this week - the one thing we have to do is get ourselves up off the floor once more, and at least do something to get things moving again in the right kind of direction. It doesn’t have to be much - much like this episode isn’t much, as I know all too well - but as long as it’s something that’s here, that’s tangible and real, then that should be enough for now. A moment’s rest: then get back to the work. There’s much to do.
So sure, sometimes we’ll find ourselves somewhat lost for words, - and yeah, that can feel a bit rough, at the time, as it has been for me this week. Or maybe it’s more that we’re more in need of better words for lost, and then un-lost too, so that we can find out how to find our way out again.